In the BBC’s new documentary The Search for Nicola Bulley, the woman who prompted a thousand headlines after going missing while walking her dog in St Michael’s on Wyre, Lancashire, quickly, gently becomes “Nicky”. It’s a small thing but a humanising one: this is a woman whose family loves and misses her furiously, whose lives will never be the same after her loss.
The hour-long programme – which retraces Bulley’s steps and explores the family’s plight and the subsequent furore around her disappearance – is unflinching in its exposure of their grief. But there is something else that comes through just as clearly: the importance of responsible media coverage around missing people.
